Monday 17 May 2010

Launch of nationwide campaign for tax justice

Joint advisory to broad left 
from Socialist Worker and Alliance Party

Monday 17 May 2010

The Alliance Party and Socialist Worker are jointly launching a nationwide tax campaign on Saturday 22 May.

The campaign will champion tax changes of benefit to grassroots New Zealanders. The focus will be a non-CIR petition sponsored by both Socialist Worker and the Alliance Party, which requests parliament to:

1. Remove GST from food.
2. Tax financial speculation.


These two demands will address injustices in the current tax system. Grassroots people have to pay tax on one of life’s necessities, food, while financial speculation goes untaxed. These injustices will be made worse when the National government this week delivers its 2010 Budget, where GST will almost certainly be increased to 15%.

The GST hike will compound the pain at the supermarket where food prices are already shooting upwards, driven by international speculation in the necessities of life. The budgets of grassroots New Zealanders will be stretched to breaking point. In this context we expect the petition demands to be very popular.

Targeting neoliberalism 

GST is a regressive tax that has strong support within corporate, banking and government circles. And unrestrained financialisation has become the central pillar of neoliberal capitalism and the source of an escalating proportion of the profits made by the world’s super-rich over the last few decades.

The one-two counterpunch contained in the tax petition, to (1) remove GST from food, and (2) tax financial speculation, hits the heart of neoliberalism. The petition will be an important mobilising tool in the strategic struggle around tax policy in New Zealand, with the grassroots facing-off against those who continue to promote the neoliberal agenda.

Taxing financial speculation through the introduction of a Financial Transaction Tax (FTT) would easily fund the removal of GST on food. At the same time an FTT would help discourage financial speculation, which destabilises the economy and causes untold harm to ordinary people, as the global financial crisis has proven.

How you can help

Socialist Worker and the Alliance Party are extending an open invite to other individuals and groups to support our tax campaign, which launches on Saturday 22 May, two days after National's budget.

The most obvious way that you can help is to collect signatures for the petition. The Alliance Party and Socialist Worker will widely distribute copies of our tax petition to everyone who wants to help.

Numbers are going to count. The more signatures we get, the more chance we have of building enough campaign momentum to connect with multitudes of New Zealanders and thus increase the pressure for fundamental changes in government policies.

As our campaign grows, more opportunities may well emerge for wider cooperation among the broad left around tax justice and many other issues. We'd like to get your feedback and hear your ideas.

In solidarity,

Vaughan Gunson (Socialist Worker)
and
Victor Billot (Alliance Party)


For more information contact:

Vaughan Gunson
Campaign coordinator
(09)433 8897
021-0415 082
svpl(at)xtra.co.nz

Victor Billot
Media spokesperson
021-482 219
victor(at)victorbillot.com


4 comments:

Don Franks said...

Grant, thanks for the invite. I have some feelings of sympathy for the class forces albeit vaguely depicted - for capitalists read "neo liberalism" for working class read "the grass roots".
But this thing you've sent is pokie socialism. Never mind materialist dialectics. Just, one bright fine day, find the magic number that will press the big big button of the masses and then bingo. Jackpot for the broad left advisers.
I don't think there is a broad left on our patch right now. The hard result of the $15 campaign indicated that.
Grant , you've emailed several of these projects to me over the last few years for endorsement and I've raised some issues with them but never had a reply. If you're fair dinkum about the broad left, defend your position. Tell me why this one's going to fly when the last few flopped.

David said...

It’s simply not true that the “last few” campaigns of this sort “flopped”.

The two most relevant reference points for the tax justice petition are RAM’s GST off food petition and Unite’s minimum wage petition.

RAM’s petition was both popular and successful. It put the issue on the political map, gained tens of thousands of signatures, won support from several trade unions, Grey Power and the Maori Party. In a small but significant way it helped to shift the tax debate away from Labour and National’s competition around who could offer the biggest income tax cuts.

It’s true that, few of the 3,000 people who signed RAM membership forms on the back of the campaign got actively involved, or even voted for RAM, but the lack of success of RAM’s election campaign doesn’t take away from the GST off food campaigns other achievements.

Since the election, the issue has continued to bubble away. Various public health experts have backed the demand. Political commentator Gordon Campbell recently came out in support of it, which swung others. The Maori Party has a bill currently before parliament, the Labour Party itself is now talking about GST off fresh fruit and vegetables (a major turn around) and, I believe an Auckland Labour Party conference recently voted to support GST off all food.

Unite’s $15 minimum wage petition failed to get the 300,000 signatures needed to force a referendum, this is a failure, but not a flop. It still got a lot of names, and I would say that it has helped shift the debate around wages to the left.

Another important achievement for that campaign was the practical co-operation between leftists on a project focused on reaching out to grassroots people – for example members of WP, SW, the Alliance and anarchists all played a part here in Christchurch.

The tax justice campaign launched by Socialist Worker and the Alliance is building on the strengths of these two earlier campaigns, but because it’s not closely tied to an election campaign like RAM’s petition, and is not aiming for a certain large number of signatures in a certain short time, like the Unite petition, it should avoid the failings mentioned above.

As with any campaign, success will be measured in different ways: by the number of people who sign the petition, the number who become active in the campaign, the extent to which its demands are debated in the mainstream, the damage done to GST as a whole the pressure applied to politicians, perhaps ultimately by the removal of GTS from food and the implementation of an FTT by an incoming Labour-led government. It will also be measured by things like the working relationships forged between SW and alliance activists and other who join the campaign, the credibility this may give to broad left campaigns, the numbers who make a long term commitment to socialist activism by joining either SW or the Alliance.

Anonymous said...

An assessment of the Unite $15 campaign will be published in the next issue of The Spark.
David claims:“RAM’s petition was both popular and successful.”
“ It put the issue on the political map, gained tens of thousands of signatures, won support from several trade unions, Grey Power and the Maori Party. In a small but significant way it helped to shift the tax debate away from Labour and National’s competition around who could offer the biggest income tax cuts.
It’s true that, few of the 3,000 people who signed RAM membership forms on the back of the campaign got actively involved, or even voted for RAM, but the lack of success of RAM’s election campaign doesn’t take away from the GST off food campaigns other achievements.

Since the election, the issue has continued to bubble away. Various public health experts have backed the demand. Political commentator Gordon Campbell recently came out in support of it, which swung others. The Maori Party has a bill currently before parliament, the Labour Party itself is now talking about GST off fresh fruit and vegetables (a major turn around) and, I believe an Auckland Labour Party conference recently voted to support GST off all food.”

Might the various groups and individuals cited above not have drawn conclusions about GST without RAM’s intervention?
But that is not the main point. On the face of it, deliberately limiting the demand to GST off food and arguing in terms of affordability looks like ‘common sense’ , and that’s how RAM presented its case.
“Commonsense' requests to authorities are not quantitative changes leading to a qualitative rupture. Such requests are not political changes at all, but a reorganisation of what's seen to be socially affordable. That approach may get signatures without fuss, but leaves nothing in its wake, because it avoids the necessary clash of ideas that is required for any political advance. An aspect of popular ‘sensible’ campaigns is that they can actually reinforce acceptance of the present system as arbiter of what’s practical and possible – and not possible. This is not to say reforms shouldn’t be fought for, it is to say that struggles for reforms do not all intrinsically translate into revolutionary consciousness, or even class consiousness
Holding up the Labour party’s hypocritical and cynical posturing on GST as something progressive is bizarre. The longer workers retain any residue of hope from supporting Labour the more their struggle for liberation is delayed.
I am well aware of the huge effort that RAM put into its GST off food campaign, but am forced to conclude that it in terms of advance to socialism, the effort was wasted.

Don Franks said...

ps, the above is from me, somehow my name didn't register when I posted.

Don Franks